The month of March is host to many significant events: the mailing of graduate school decisions, Saint Patrick’s Day and, of course, madness. What many people don’t know, and what I just found out this afternoon, is that March is also National Women’s History Month (WHM). I knew my uterus felt funny when I woke up this morning.

I got pretty excited when I found out about WHM, partially because I’m interested in women’s history but mostly because it occurred to me that my column would be a perfect platform for proclaiming some other month, perhaps June, to be National Elise Kramer Appreciation Month. I began dreaming up the ways in which NEKAM would be commemorated: posters, dramatic public readings of my articles, Take Your Daughter to Elise Kramer Day. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be; apparently, in order for a month to be declared the National Month of Anything, a resolution needs to be passed by Congress.

So I’ll just have to be satisfied with WHM, which shows how far our country has come. Whereas women couldn’t even vote a century ago, now we get an entire twelfth of the year! Well, we don’t get the entire twelfth of the year — that would just be greedy. We share our month with many other important issues, such as: Play the Recorder Month, National Frozen Food Month and National Umbrella Month. For too long, Americans have wandered around in the rain, getting sopping wet and thinking, “If only there were some kind of portable dome made out of waterproof material that I could hold over my head when it rained! And why does it take so gosh-darned long to make mashed potatoes?”

Okay, so maybe it isn’t so hard to get Congress to devote a month to your cause after all. But it’s probably safe to say that more people celebrate WHM than, say, Deep Vein Thrombosis Month (are you supposed to fight thrombosis or develop it?). That’s because WHM serves a seemingly noble and expansive goal: narrowing the gender gap by emphasizing important women in history, a topic not usually covered by the standard history curriculum. As the history books would have it, the world was created by starched, frilly white men, with only a few exceptions:

• Betsy Ross, who sewed a few pieces of fabric together for the starched, frilly white men
• Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony, the only non-metaphorical women to appear on federally minted coins — and, coincidentally, also the only non-metaphorical women to appear on coins that became so despised by the American public that they weren’t even spent
• Amelia Earheart … ’nuff said.

WHM attempts to provide alternative role models, women who have changed the world for the better by breaking out of the stereotypically feminine mold. The National Women’s History Project (NWHP), creators of WHM, provides educational materials for classrooms, including a list of honorees that changes every year. Previous honorees have included obvious selections — Abigail Adams, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger — as well as not-so-obvious ones: Frances Willard, leader of the ill-advised Temperance Movement; Tye Leung Schulze, a Chinese interpreter; and Kitty O’Neal, a stuntwoman who has “jumped off a 105 foot cliff, has crashed cars, been set on fire, and jumped off a ten-story building.” (I’m duly impressed, but do we really want to be teaching seven-year-old girls that being set on fire is the way to make history?)

In case I haven’t made it clear already, I don’t think WHM is a good idea. In fact, I think it’s a pretty bad idea, for several reasons. For one, it’s counterproductive; why should we be encouraging schools to limit the teaching of women’s history to a single month? While that’s obviously not the goal of the movement, it is its effective consequence. Back in December, Morgan Freeman appeared on 60 Minutes with some harsh words about Black History Month (BHM): “I don’t want a black history month,” Freeman told an astounded Mike Wallace, “Black History is American History.” Like BHM, WHM implies that women’s history is separate from American history, when what we really should be doing is making sure to talk about the other 50 percent of the population when teaching “regular” history in schools.

And how should we do that? Certainly not the way that WHM recommends, talking about individual women overlooked by history. Sure, you’ve got your Marie Curies and your Elizabeth Cady Stantons, who should definitely be discussed if they aren’t already, but… a temperance activist? An interpreter? A stuntwoman? While these women have surely accomplished more than the average person, they wouldn’t warrant mention in an elementary school classroom if they had been white males. This is historical affirmative action, and it sends the message that the standards for importance are lower for women — that women have not really accomplished all that much, and so we should take pity on them and celebrate the most insignificant of their achievements, be it unsuccessfully banning alcohol or jumping off a 105-foot cliff.

This country didn’t have founding mothers; our presidents, our generals, and a majority of our activists have been male; and even today, a majority of the history-making positions in the country are held by men. The way to counteract this sad fact is not to make up reasons why women have been just as influential as men — it is to educate students about why women haven’t been as influential on the whole. Teach them about inequality, about how women were proudly called “the weaker sex” for centuries; about how it was thought that education would shrivel women’s reproductive organs, rendering them infertile; about how women were considered their husbands’ property and expected to submit to their every need; about how, until Margaret Sanger came along, countless young women killed themselves because they couldn’t stand to have another child and had no other way to staunch the endless flow. That is American history and women’s history, and it makes clear the strength of the women who fought against the overwhelming current and helped us get where we are today.